


Rebirth

by chelseafrew



Category: Room - Emma Donoghue
Genre: Angst, Gen, Infant Death, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 15:42:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8897674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chelseafrew/pseuds/chelseafrew
Summary: After a tragic loss, Joy's life in captivity is changed irrevocably again.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [orangesandlemons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orangesandlemons/gifts).



> My thanks to orangesandlemons for the prompts. I was truly excited to get to write for this book, as I spent the last third of 2015 absolutely obsessed with it. I hope you enjoy this little piece I put together.
> 
> My thanks, also, to my BFF CL for beta reading and general hand-holding.
> 
> Happy Holidays!

The problem was, when she closed her eyes, Joy could picture her. She was small, a little short for her age, with long brown hair and bright blue eyes. When she smiled, it lit up the room. She was smart, a quick learner, and she had endless questions. She loved dolls and horses, and she didn’t mind hanging with her mom just relaxing and watching TV.

Joy tried to put the little girl who might have been out of her head, but with little else to do, the little girl kept coming back into her thoughts. She would be staring at the mindless cartoons running in the early morning hours, and a small voice would ring through her head asking why the sky was blue or how the pictures of the animals got into the television set. Or she would be cooking and an image would float through her brain of the little girl standing on a chair in front of the counter stirring cookie mix. The harder she tried to force these thoughts out, the more of them flooded in.

She had only gotten to hold the tiny baby for a short while. The cord had been wrapped around the baby's neck for too long, tinging her face blue, but her features were perfect. She'd had a button nose, full cheeks, and red lips shaped in a flawless bow. Joy had stared at her every second she was allowed to, trying desperately to store the vision in her memory before he stole her away.

There were moments she realized she had been just a little too successful. When she wasn't picturing the child her baby might have grown to be, she was picturing the still face of the baby who'd had the misfortune to be born to a mother trapped in a shed. All he'd done was watch, unwilling to step in and help when it became clear that something was dreadfully wrong.

Days passed, then weeks, then months. Every day it was a struggle to go for very long without imagining how different it would have been had the baby not gotten all tangled up in the cord.

She wouldn't have been alone any more. Her life--such as it was--would have had purpose again. She would have had a real reason to live beyond the slim hope that she would be released…set free.

Her days, however, had returned to the monotony from before she got pregnant. She watched TV during all the daylight hours, trying desperately to forget her predicament and banish the images of her baby-that-wasn't. He came at night to pleasure himself while she used every bit of energy she had to visualize herself anywhere else--the beach, the track, her bedroom at home--then he would leave. She had long since stopped crying herself to sleep.

According to the calendar she had begged for, it was four months since the tiny baby girl had been born, then died. Joy crossed off the day before, Sunday. In the days before she had been taken, Mondays had been the hardest day of the week, with the need to shake off the weekend filled with parties or studying and face the five days ahead of classes and part-time work. Now Mondays were just days in which she fried her brain cells with talk shows and reality television before he came for his nightly fuck.

She had grown used to lying in bed for a little while every morning, processing her thoughts, trying to dredge up some positivity. This became increasingly difficult as time moved forward without her. Every day, though, she forced herself to rise and do the best she could with her time, even if that meant watching TV sitting on the carpet instead of from a horizontal position on the bed.

This particular Monday morning, however, she was driven from between the thin, ugly sheets before she had found a positive thought to cling to. She barely made it to the toilet before she lost every bit of the meager dinner she had made herself Sunday night.

Her first thought was that he had brought her some food that wasn't fresh. She had had food poisoning before, and it had felt just like this. You were miserable for about twenty-four hours, then you got better--and afterwards you avoided that food for a while, if you had that luxury. So she crawled back into bed and didn't leave it all day except to throw up some more every hour or so. She was so pale and gross that when he came that Monday night, he turned right back around, leaving her alone. Who knew food poisoning could have a silver lining?

By Tuesday morning, she was not feeling a whole lot better. She did try to eat some toast, but she couldn't keep it down. Figuring that she must have eaten something particularly nasty, she spent another day under the covers. Once again, she was still looking unwell enough that he didn't stay Tuesday night, either.

By Wednesday morning, she knew she didn't have food poisoning.

For the next week, she assumed she had managed to catch--probably from him--a stomach bug. He dropped off some stomach medication, then stayed away a few days, probably hoping she would get over whatever it was she had. That was the only good part about feeling constantly sick to her stomach.

It was when the sickness lingered long past when she should have been well that she realized she had felt this way before. Memory was a sneaky thing, hiding in the shadows, making you forget what you should remember until there's no other choice but to release the feelings and the emotions you tried so hard to repress.

She was pregnant. Again.

He was furious when she told him, mistakenly assuming that since it hadn't been that long since she'd lost her baby girl, she couldn't get pregnant again. Joy assumed that he'd received an F in Sex Ed.

When she'd realized she was carrying a baby the first time, Joy had bonded with her instantly, talking to her non-stop, and imagining what it would be like to be her mother. Even if she had to be a mother in a tiny, twelve-by-twelve shed.

She wasn't that dumb this time around. She didn't talk to the baby, and she didn't allow herself to imagine what it would be like to be its mother. When he came--and he did start coming again--she refused to talk about it. She had experienced more than her share of disappointment; there was certainly no point in courting more.

Just as had been the case the first time, he had no problem continuing his nightly visits even as she grew bigger and bigger and bigger. He simply invented ways to fuck her that avoided her baby bump.

She estimated that she was almost exactly nine months pregnant when she felt her first labor pains. She didn't even know what to wish for, that the baby be born like the last or that the baby be born okay. She did know that whichever way this went, she was demanding birth control if he was going to continue to hold her against her will for his pleasure.

She was in her sixth hour of labor when he came for his nightly call. She screamed at him and kicked him out. Under any other circumstances, he would have laughed at her and then had his way with her anyway. Like her, however, he no doubt vividly recalled how her first labor had ended. And like her, he probably had no desire to relive it, so he left.

All night, the pains came and went, came and went. It had not taken this long the first time. She moved from the floor to the bed, then back to the floor. She tried the breathing techniques she had seen women do in the movies; it almost helped.

Finally, after many more long hours, she felt the urge to push, and she did. She pushed and pushed and pushed, willing the baby inside her to come out.

The first morning light was just coming in through the skylight when the baby finally slid out of her, right onto the carpet.

It was a boy. His eyes were wide open, looking right at her, as if she held all the answers in the world.

Maybe this time would be different.

Joy carefully picked him up, unconcerned with the mess, and she looked right back into his eyes, as if he held all the answers in the world.

"Hello, Jack."

End (23 November 2016)


End file.
